Peter Saul, Curmudgeonly Father of Pop Art, Has a New Exhibit

Artist Peter Saul, photographed at his studio in Germantown, New York.

Photograph by John Huba.

An unapologetically irreverent, iconoclastic, and stylistic synthesizer, Peter Saul, at 81, is a beloved if curmudgeonly father of Pop art. In November, New York’s Mary Boone Gallery features his newest paintings based on “historical classics,” including Rigaud’s full-length portrait Louis XIV, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus. In these spirited re-interpretations, Saul is looking at the classics, he explains, according to his “will or whimsy. I let the subject guide me”—and that’s an understatement. His work is steeped in art-historical reference with influences ranging from “Smokey Stover” comics and the pages of Mad magazine to the paintings of Francis Bacon, Paul Cadmus, and George Tooker. The result of the uncorking of this artist’s id is unruly and imaginative: cartoony mayhem, hilarious brutality, social commentary delivered with maniacal glee. The graphic intensity is cut only by the humor and a unique blend of social narrative and catastrophic comedy, rendered in signature psychedelic hues, vivid acidic colors that burn with brightness. Saul’s figures look as if a balloon bender had run amok, creating rubbery SpongeBob-style mythological figures, psychosexual subconsciousness spillover that is at once grotesque, lurid, and spot-on. Artist Eric Fischl says, “He paints what came out of the mouth of Munch’s Scream. He paints why he screamed.”

“Peter has elbowed out his own place in the contemporary-art world,” says Brian Donnelly, the artist/toy-maker known as KAWS. “He’s never been an artist you could put a label on or add to a group. He’s created his own lane on the highway, and he’s not looking back.” Peter Saul is an artist comfortable with the uncomfortable, a charming if goofy contrarian, who says with a self-deprecating smile, “I’m not a team player,” and carries on.